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Thursday, April 11, 2013

What The Hell Am I Doing Here?

Tonight's blog title brought to you by "Creep", the cover done by Glee, which has been stuck in my head almost all day long. It really has no other bearing on tonight's blog post, other than I got lost a few times on the course tonight. haha.

Before we dive in to the break down I'd like to say hi to my agility instructor who is reading tonight.

HI!

And then, my promised video comparison of Trophy Versus Demo on the dog walk. I felt that Demo was more controlled than he has been, which could be due to the dog walk being at full height for the first time, but you can still very clearly see how different he is from Trophy. Trophy was in the middle of a run and has some momentum while Demo was starting from a standstill. We have decided, after viewing this, that I'm going to try to teach Trophy to run for a target/reward so he has more drive across the dog walk.

Ok, now on to the class break down. Due to storms and Pan's thunderphobia, I left her at home tonight. So it was just me and the boys at class. Trophy's class had a really fun course with some interesting and challenging jump sequences.

The drawing tonight is especially sketchy, and absolutely not drawn to scale. I'm imagining my agility instructor cringing and rolling her eyes at me, and probably threatening to beat me when she sees me next or something...

So you are coming into what I labeled 1 from the weaves, so dog is on the right at 1, front cross on the landing into 2. Fun 360type post turny move at 3-5, front cross into dog on right for 6. Then came the really fun part: distance! My dogs are learning distance and I'm super proud of how Trophy handled this as I *know* I'm going to need to know how to do lots of this for Demo. So my path was to cut from 6 to the landing side of 9 where I would front cross into 10 while pushing Trophy out and around 7 and 8. He did this SO FREAKING BEAUTIFULLY the first time... and then we pulled out the video camera and it all went straight to hell. But anyway... I freaking love that feeling when we are so connected and working in sync I love my dog, have I mentioned that? No one else tried to add the distance, but I went for it. What's my agility catch phrase lately? That's right, Balls Out. lol. :)

9 through 11 is pretty easy, dog on the left. Slightly tricky entry into the tunnel, as Trophy did it correctly once, and then went into the wrong side of the tunnel. First time he went into the wrong side I was calling here and totally signalling forward motion.. Second time as I'm trying to keep up with him I'm leaning back to try to signal collection, but yeah, still moving forward, so he still entered wrong. So third time, totally over exaggerated ALL SYSTEMS STOP, and he turned and went in the correct side of the tunnel. Of course it works when you listen to your instructor (no, I'm not really sucking up here, promise. maybe.)

So I really did enjoy working through that sequence.

Then on to Demo's class. Like I said earlier, I really felt like he was much calmer and collected tonight. We worked on a small sequence with the A-frame and a turn on the flat.

I'm waiting for some bad-agility-course-drawing-police to come arrest me. Seriously.

As this was our first sequence, baby-dog was a bit bonkers the first run through, so we did it again right away and it was slightly better. After everyone ran through it and we attempted it a third time I really felt him settle in, we were connected, he waited for my directions, and I didn't feel like he was crazy-dogging it. Now, it could be that he just learned the pattern I wanted, but I'm going to try to make myself feel better and say it was team work.

After that we went to the dog walk, which you can see on the video above. This was their first time running it at full height. Demo was slightly slower and more collected than before, but I'm ok with that, really. Then we did a small sequence, tire jump at a perpendicular angle to the entry of the dog walk so we kind of had to shape their entry, which is difficult with wild man, but he still did it well. Then we did the opposite on the way back, with us running between the dog walk and the wall. On the second run through of this sequence we added a front cross after the dog walk before the tire jump. On that last run through I opted to not use treats in Demo's target lids, it worked the way out (tire, dogwalk), but I should have given him something while i tried to do the front cross as he broke his contact for the first time in a while.

All in all, very happy with how everything went tonight. Pan will be back next week, so get ready for some crazy antics from her!